The Conservative Party rarely talks about the Big Society agenda any more since its peak in 2011. Nevertheless, the idea that communities should step in where the state has retreated remains a core feature of Conservative policy in government. This raises serious questions.

Are those communities most affected by the withdrawal of central and local government services really the people best placed to replace these services? Can the withdrawal of tax money be replaced by voluntary action and fundraised income in communities hit by years of austerity and economic turbulence? Can equality of access to services be guaranteed by ad hoc voluntary provision? Or is this more likely to lead to growing inequality as areas rich enough to provide for themselves prosper and those in already downtrodden areas are simply left behind?

To start to explore these questions, I turned to the charity register. As each charity has a registered address, it is possible to pull out a list of all charities broken down by location of its main office. I decided to look at the last ten years of data to try and identify where charitable organisations are being set up - is it in the poorer areas most in need? Or wealthier areas with more free time and money to invest in the process of setting up charities? Of course not all charities are set up to serve the areas they work in - some will be overseas, or work nationally, but most charities are small local organisations, so this should still provide a useful proxy for the provision of local voluntary services.

The results are shown below in a map of local authorities in England, showing the number of charities registered per 1,000 people between 2005 and 2015. The highest concentration of charities per head of population is across the prosperous south of England and wealthy rural areas such as David Cameron's own constituency in West Oxfordshire and the Cotswolds.

One of the few anomalies is London. Despite having many of the most deprived local authority areas in Britain, it also has comparatively high numbers of charities being registered. It seems likely that this is down to the number of national charities that are registered in London, attracting an unusually high number of charities for the size of its boroughs. Many charities with an aspiration for growth on the national level will register an office in the capital. It seems fair then to discount London as an outlier when looking at the relationship between how deprived an area is and the number of charities that are established in an area.

This relationship is plotted out on the chart below, which looks at the number of charities registered per head of population (excluding London) plotted against the local authority's score on the English Indices of Multiple Deprivation (where a lower score means more deprived). The results are clear - there is a linear relationship, with more charities being registered in wealthier areas. The correlation coefficient for this relationship is 0.41, suggesting a moderate positive relationship.

The implication for Big Society and similar policies is also clear. While there is more work to be done to establish more rigorously what kinds of services are being provided by local (and national charities) and to what extent they are or can replace state functions, it seems likely that voluntary action is not capable of filling the gap in poorer parts of the country. Withdrawing state funding and services and encouraging communities to fend for themselves is likely to work fine for wealthier areas, but will leave poorer areas behind.

4 Comments

Interesting analysis. Some further points come to mind, for which I have no supporting data:
When a charity is set up, its ability to raise funds depends on the ability of those starting the charity having the necessary skills. For example, securing funds from a statutory or philantropic body requires form filling as well as clear and concise statement of aims and objectives. To continue doing this means having proper accounts and reports. The more disadvantaged an area the less likely these skills will be available, to my mind.
The route to forming and registering a charity is firstly to set up a voluntary organisation and then once established to push for charitable status. If the requisite skills are not available in the organisation, then the transition to charity may not happen. It may be that the voluntary organisation thrives in the community with little funding, but doing good voluntary work, in which case the analysis of charity formation data will not pick this up. Or it may be that in the absence of skills the voluntary organisation fades away after a (short?) time.
Where charities set up, whether in disadvantaged or affluent areas, the emphasis will be as much on the interests of those who set up the charities as on the needs of the area. Therefore relying on initiatives of charities is likely to result in specific disadvantages not being catered for. If the local authorities are charged with delivering services, there is a greater likelihood that the services will be needs driven.
On the downside for Council delivered services, they can be bureaucratic and be less flexible than charities, at least than smaller charities - big charities may be no less bureaucratic than councils.
I'm not sure whether the above contributes much, being as it is a bit disjointed and lacking in data to back it up. But hopefully it will provoke some discussion.

There is an aspect of this sort of numbers analysis that is usually overlooked and that is the position of unincorporated associations i.e. community groups that aren't registered charities. Your work complements similar studies done by TSRC and others and one explanation for the apparently uneven distribution may be that more deprived areas favour the less formal unincorporated associations, whereas more wealthy areas favour more formal structures such as registered charity. As the formal structures are all registered with one regulator they are much easier to count. The numbers of unincorporated associations (and their geographical distribution) is much harder to pin down.
However, I think your final conclusion is probably correct and we should therefore be pressing corporations and the wealthy to pay their taxes to fund state provision rather than imagining that philanthropy will fill the gap.

This is a really good article and although there are caveats about the data and registrations against areas of operation it backs up our experience. With our local authorities (and I guess many others) reducing services and actively targeting ‘making communities more resilient’ in their policies there is a danger that this inequality will increase. Those areas where councils can find funding or where there are already resilient communities will continue to prosper and those that most need help will fall further behind.
It would be interesting to plot deprivation against the number of charities and see if there is a correlation. Our experience in Cambridgeshire suggests that there is.

What strikes me about this is that the correlation is made at local authority area (UA and districts by the look of it). It contrasts with the summary of the NCVO Almanac https://data.ncvo.org.uk/a/almanac16/geography-2/ which indicates there are more charities registered in areas of the highest deprivation, although perhaps a lower ratio of charities to population. Is this just a question of scale of analysis? The other thing that strikes me looking at Somerset, is that there is a correlation between nos of charities with areas of high rural deprivation (Access to Services and Housing in the IMD) at district level. Perhaps not a surprise : areas with dispersed communities tend to be served by multiple smaller organisations, rather than smaller numbers of larger organisations. Finally, and with a nod to rurality, don't forget that the majority of disadvantaged people (depending on your definition) live outside the most deprived areas. That is not to say that we should ignore IMD, but it disguises as much as it reveals.